evidently the individual whom he had most reason
to dread, and on being told that Littlefield was
the person who discovered the bones in the
vault, he smote his thigh, and in a low voice
murmured, "Then I am a ruined man!"

Overwhelmed with this conviction, when
arraigned before the magistrates on the Monday
following his arrest, he declined to submit
himself for examination, or to offer any explanation
whatsoever of the appalling incidents by which
he was imperilled. He never ventured even to ask
for a copy of the charges on which he was
consigned to prison. It is not possible now to say
whether this reticence was the result of despair,
or whether he regarded silence as the safest
course, at a crisis when his only possible
chance might lay in the hesitation on the part
of a jury to convict on evidence which, was
still exclusively circumstantial. His demeanour
continued calm during the long interval
between committal in November and the opening
of his trial in the following March. On
that solemn occasion he pleaded "Not guilty"
to the charge of murdering Dr. Parkman.
His outward fortitude never for a moment
deserted him during the twelve days over which
the trial was protracted; and link by link the
formidable chain of evidence coiled itself round
him. Even when the fatal sentence of death
was pronounced, he still protested his
innocence, and declared himself the victim of secret
conspiracy and public delusion.

V.

The interval between sentence and execution
was long, owing to the hearing of a writ of error
on a matter of form, as well as deliberations on
petitions for a new trial, all of which were
ineffectual. At length, early in July, the
Governor of Massachusetts presided in a State
Committee on Pardons to consider a petition
from Dr. Webster, which contained his confession
of the murder, coupled with an entreaty
that his punishment might be commuted from
death to imprisonment, on the grounds that
the provocation he received from Dr. Parkman
had so exasperated him that he slew him in a
paroxysm ot fury. This crime must, therefore,
he argued, be regarded not as deliberate murder,
but as homicide in the mitigated form of
manslaughter. This appeal, like the previous one,
was unsuccessful. The Committee of Pardons,
in their report, failed to recognise in the
convict's statement an impress of truth such as
could weaken the recorded proof of premeditation,
and the sentence was eventually carried
into execution.

Coupling this most extraordinary confession
with the evidence previously given, it
was apparent that in the midst of the interview
to which he had invited Dr. Parkman,
Dr. Webster had suddenly felled him by a blow
which crushed in the skull. The alleged
provocation given him by Dr. Parkman was, to a great
extent, untrue. The unhappy prisoner found
it essential to dwell upon this in order to
sustain his palliative assertion of anger and
sudden rage; but the preparations he had made,
and the appliances he had in readiness to
get rid of the dead body, were altogether
inconsistent with the theory of surprise, and only
reconcilable with deliberate and careful
premeditation.

Having deprived his victim of life, he said that
he raised the dead body from the floor of the upper
laboratory, where it was stretched, and dragged
it into the private room adjoining, in which there
was a sink, and there he stripped it of every
article of clothing, including the hat and boots;
and these he consumed in the stove, along
with the contents of the pockets, excepting a
watch, which he flung into the river in the
evening as he made his way home to
Cambridge. The next movement was to lift the
body into the sink, and this Dr. Webster
explained that he effected by sitting the corpse
partially erect in the corner, and, climbing up
into the sink himself, he succeeded in dragging
it up. There he quickly dismembered it by
means of the sharp hunting-knife found in the
tan, and the blood as it flowed he washed
down by a continuous stream from the water-
pipe. The head and other parts he carried to
the lower laboratory, and there burned them in
the stove; the hands and feet he disposed of in
the same manner the following day. The trunk
thus disfigured he divided into halves, each
of which he placed in the leaden cisterns under
the laboratory tables, covering them thoroughly
with a strong solution of alkali, in the hope that
it would macerate, and so dissolve the flesh. In
this he was disappointed; and he was forced to
withdraw the bones and dispose of them as
they were eventually found in the box and in
the vault, from the latter of which places he
could readily draw up the limbs with the fish-
hooks and grapnel as he found facilities for
burning them. In moving these heavy pieces
of human flesh across the pavement and down
the stairs, blood was necessarily spattered on
the walls; and the marks of this he removed
by washing the place with diluted nitrate of
copper—a preparation which he knew to be an
active solvent of blood.

But the destruction of a human body by fire
proved to be a greatly more tedious process than
the professor had at first imagined, more
especially as he had to work with a number of small
stoves and fireplaces instead of one capacious
furnace. An amateur anatomist, who gave
evidence on the trial, illustrated this difficulty by
stating that he had much experience in "burning
up and getting rid of human remains" after
dissection; and, from the peculiar smell, it was
extremely difficult to effect it without attracting
attention. He had once, he said, received
as a present from the United States Marshal the
dead body of a pirate, whose bones only he was
desirous to preserve, and being obliged to get
rid quickly of the flesh, as the weather was
warm, he found that it required nearly two days
to consume the soft parts alone with pine-
chips and other highly combustible fuel. He